Four Bodies, One Mission: Fix Europe's Grid Supply Chain

Four EU energy bodies met in Brussels to address the equipment shortages threatening Europe's grid expansion

21 May 2026

Europe's grid build-out is being slowed by something more stubborn than policy: a shortage of cables, transformers, and the factories to make them. Four of the continent's leading energy organisations moved to address that gap in Brussels this month.

On 5 May 2026, DSO Entity, ENTSO-E, Europacable, and T&D Europe held a stakeholder workshop to strengthen electricity grid supply chains across the EU. System operators, manufacturers, suppliers, and EU institutional actors joined the session, which reviewed progress under the Joint Roadmap towards Future-Proof Grids, a framework the four bodies launched in 2025 to align infrastructure demand with European manufacturing output.

Three parallel sessions covered the workshop's main ground: circularity and sustainability in supply chains; reform of EU procurement rules for specialised grid equipment; and security requirements, both physical and cyber, for critical infrastructure. Together, the agenda reflects a sector-wide acknowledgement that permitting reform alone cannot deliver what the grid requires.

The scale of the equipment challenge is considerable. With €800 billion in cross-border and offshore grid investment required by 2050, ENTSO-E has called for 40 per cent of grid components to be sourced domestically by 2030, alongside more than 100,000 kilometres of new transmission lines. Supply chain constraints were identified at the April 2026 European Grids Summit as one of three core bottlenecks, alongside financing and permitting delays, and have since moved firmly onto the regulatory agenda.

Manufacturers need forward demand visibility to justify factory expansion. Faster approvals, without it, simply reveal a different bottleneck.

As the EU Grids Package advances through legislation as a 2026 priority, the four organisations confirmed continued engagement with the European Commission, with workshop outcomes feeding into the next phase of the Joint Roadmap. The window to align procurement reform with permitting acceleration is narrowing.